Junot Diaz

An interview with Junot Diaz

In a video Q&A, Junot Díaz eloquently explains why he enjoys writing about his character Yunior in This Is How You Lose Her; and in a written interview, he discusses his first book, Drown, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

In the video below, Junot Díaz eloquently explains why he enjoys writing about his character Yunior in This Is How You Lose Her; and in the following written interview, he discusses his first book, Drown, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Junot Diaz discusses his first two
books, Drown and the The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

How has your life changed since the publication of Drown a decade
ago? Was the sudden acclaim energizing or disorienting?

We're talking eleven years (to be exact), so of course one's life is
bound to change plenty. But Drown acted like an accelerant, it put
things into overdrive. To be honest, in real terms, the publication of my
first book really didn't produce much acclaim. I was known among the
story-writing nerds and the MFA types and the New Yorker crowd
(whoever they are) and in certain sectors of the Dominican community, but
that was about it. Still, even that little bit of "fame" was a lot for an
anonymous immigrant kid from central Jersey who'd worked his way through
school. As for its real effects: I sure wasn't ready for that kind of
attention (by which I mean any kind), so after the book was published I
found myself withdrawing deeper into my core of friends (most from
childhood), into my students, into my work. I was (and am)
super-self-conscious, but Drown made me even more so. Don't know
why. But my God: I've seen the world because of my writing, and met the most
extraordinary people. Drown has given me a contemplative life and
allowed me to support the causes I am most passionate about, and help other
writers and shine light on a minute fraction of the New Jersey Dominican
experience. It's been a source of joy in spite of my discomforts, and that's
the way of most good things, I suppose.

Why do you think people responded so strongly to that story
collection, and still remember and talk about it?

Man, even my publisher calls my first book a short-story collection!
Okay, for the record: Since its inception, Drown was neither a
novel nor a story collection, but something a little more hybrid, a little
more creolized. Which was why we didn't put "Stories" or "A Novel" on the
cover. We wanted folks to decide what it was, as long as they didn't
foreclose that it could also be something else, ¿entiendes? Okay, enough
about my categorical anxieties...

Regarding your question: I've been really fortunate. Drown is
one of those little-known books that stays in print because a sector of
folks just seems to like it. (Could I say anything more immodest? Just
watch!) To an extent it's been popular with teachers, with students, with
lit heads, with readers, all kind of folks, really. Young writers like it
because it's structurally instructive and also because its emotional honesty
seems like something worth aiming for, surpassing. In Drown, I
wanted - in a fictional way - to bear witness to the experience of one
family in the Dominican Diaspora, one American family, in every meaning of
the word, and when you try superhard, as an artist, as a historian, as a
storyteller, as a human being, to bear witness, when you throw your heart
into that effort, people (if you're in the right place at the right time)
tend to respond. Okay, maybe it's all luck. Still, I'm happy that Drown
continues to move people. It makes all the years of silence and solitude
worth it.

Why did you wait eleven years to publish a second book, which is also
your first novel? Were you concerned about living up to the critical and
popular success of Drown?

I wish I could have written four, five books in the span of those years.
Just couldn't do it. Didn't help that the novel I was trying to write at the
start of that period was about the destruction of New York City by a psychic
terrorist (my very own Third World Akira)... a novel that 9/11 ended real
fast. Had to rethink the whole thing, was too busy experiencing the
transformations in-country to write about them in an interesting way. I
still have parts of that novel on my desk, and it's wild, watching
Heroes, to see how common our apocalyptic nightmares are (New York City
gets killed by a superhuman in that story too), and also how compelling. But
it was more than just being sideswiped by history. Other stuff. Being
scared, for sure. I can put the pressure on myself like nobody's business.
Years of depression didn't help (if you'd grown up in my family you would
have been depressed too). My own struggle against myself. Here's another
theory, which the writer David Mura told me: You have to become the person
you need to be in order to write your book. I guess it just took me ten or
so years to become that person.

What new emotional and literary challenges have you taken on with
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?

This is a novel that was born after the death of my Black Akira novel.
I'd gotten a Guggenheim (thank you, John Simon!) around 2000 and spent a
year living in Mexico City. Trying to write, trying to clear my head, trying
to improve my Spanish. I lived next door to my friend and the greatest
writer alive, Francisco Goldman, and we had all these adventures, spent many
a night getting into trouble in the big bad Distrito Federal. Anyway, one
time after a night of partying I picked up a copy of The Importance of
Being Earnest, and I said Oscar Wilde's name in Dominican and it came
out "Oscar Wao." A quick joke, but the name stayed with me, and next thing
you know, I had this vision of a poor, doomed ghetto nerd, the kind of
ghetto nerd I would have been had I not been discovered by girls the first
year out of high school. I remember dashing the first part out in a couple
of weeks. I thought it was a story, nothing more. But Oscar wouldn't stop
hanging out in my head, and I realized that I wanted to write an entire
novel about a Dominican kid who doesn't get the girls, who can't dance, who
is the opposite of all the stereotypes that we inside the Dominican
community have about "our men." I wanted to write about this nerdy romantic
kid who's haunted by history and girls, who's good only at fantasy and
science fiction, and yet who (tragically, hilariously) belongs to a
community and to a larger culture that ain't too hot on men-of-color nerds
or their interests.

But the real challenge was in trying to create a voice, a narrative, that
would allow me to talk about Zardoz and the dictatorship of Trujillo and
'80s urban hip-hop and Broca and the Diaspora Dominicana and E. E. "Doc"
Smith's Lensmen and Latin Paterson and Unus the Untouchable simultaneously.
Maybe for you that wouldn't be nada, but for me it was a challenge and a
half. I wanted a narrative that could be top-level hilarious and top-level
heartbreaking. I wanted a narrative that could be hip about the present yet
also render the past not as something dead or shackled inside sepia tones
but as something dynamic, with all its confusions, excitements,
disappointments, and energies intact.

And (finally) there was this very brainy interest I had in these weird
(and in my opinion reductive) arguments in Latin American letters between
the forces of Macondo and McOndo. The short version is that Force McOndo
claims that the "New Latin America" cannot be usefully described by the
traditional magic realist literatures of the Boom (Force Macondo). Only
something as contemporary and MTV-ish as McOndo can do that. One movement
seeking to displace another. And me, I'm thinking, like a Caribbean, why
can't we have 'em both simultaneously? So this book was an attempt to put
Macondo and McOndo on the same page, in the same sentence, sort of to prove
that you can't write the American experience, our American experience, by
banning one set of passports in the process of privileging another. When I'm
in the DR or Colombia or Havana, I go to both salsa and dance clubs. I have
one Cuban friend who's into H. P. Lovecraft like crazy and another who's
convinced that the ancestors and the orishas speak to all of us. In the DR
you could be watching the Red Sox on satellite one minute and then hear a
ghost story the next. In my opinion, if you really want to get close to
describing what's happening in the New World, what's happened, you're going
to need it all. Every narrative strand you can muster. Every genre and
convention. A celestial mongoose? A heroin-addicted stripper-dating uncle?
I'll take 'em both.

What is
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao about?

It's about the Dominican version of the cursed House of Atreus. And it's
about this young nerd, Oscar, who risks his whole life on the chance of
finding love. It's also about New Jersey and about Rutgers and about a crazy
dictator and about cheating-dog men and how none of the hot women I grew up
with wanted anything to do with dudes like Oscar. And it's about the
foundational women in Oscar's life: his mother and his sister.

How autobiographical is it? More specifically, who is Oscar to
you? And Yunior, your main narrator, whose identity is concealed until
halfway through the book, who is he?

Well, I was hoping that this book was crazy enough that no one would ask
me if it was autobiographical. I have (as yet) not encountered a celestial
guardian mongoose, but I did grow up Dominican in New Jersey. That aside, I
certainly wasn't Oscar, and Oscar certainly isn't me. But like Oscar I loved
to read sci-fi and fantasy and horror and pulps growing up. My escape from
my father and my neighborhood.

In Drown, you gave us a world seen mainly through the eyes of
young, macho, intellectual Latino men, who hadn't been heard from very much
in literature. But in your novel, you get inside the heads of not only
different types of men, but also some very strong women, from three
generations. Women are in some sense the heart of the novel. In one chapter
you write in the voice of Oscar's sexy sister, and your take on the life of
his mother is quite tender and compassionate. Did you make a conscious
decision to write from a female point of view, or did it arise naturally? Do
you see this as part of your development as a writer and a person?

I knew this novel would live or die on its female characters. If the
women Oscar falls for ring false, then Oscar's loves would ring false, and
if that happened, well, I might as well have given up the whole damn thing.
So I worked hard on the Insane Objects of Oscar's Affections. ...Anyway,
there I was, thinking that I just had to describe Oscar's loves - and then
Oscar's mother, Belicia, happened. I knew I wanted to say some words about
her, just so we could understand Oscar better, but I didn't think she would
take over the way she did. And man, did she almost take over completely. I
ended up dumping hundreds of pages of Beli's story because it was devouring
everything else. She is epic in ways that Oscar can only dream of being;
she's the last survivor from a destroyed family who lives in the wastes of
Santo Domingo as a desperately impoverished orphan until she is rescued,
Dickens style, by a distant aunt. Beli's this young, yearning, beautiful
girl living inside the shadow of this sinister dictatorship. As a result she
is forced to become strong at a fundamental level, strong in the way only
women tend to be. Beli as a character turned into a tribute to an entire
generation of women I grew up with (my mother, her sisters, my friends) who
had come to the United States and given their lives to build our community,
to make people like me possible. Beli, in a way, was the key that opened all
the other women in the book: her daughter, Lola; her adopted mother, La
Inca; her real mother, Socorro. I found that I couldn't write just about
Beli, I had to circumscribe her entire female world. So here's my
confession: Beli and her story made me do it.

Writing across gender lines is hard. There are only a few
writers who can do this well, and most of them are women. Toni Morrison
writes some goddamn good men, and so do K. J. Bishop and Edwidge Danticat
and Octavia Butler. I wanted to write about women as well as these sisters
wrote about men; that was my goal, my dream. So of course I had my work cut
out for me, and of course I'm going to agree with you that it's part of a
writer's development to attempt to tell these cross-gender stories well.

Because of your subject matter and your cultural background, this
novel will have obvious appeal for Latino and especially Dominican readers.
Do you worry that it might be seen too narrowly, as appealing to those
readers only? What are the broader themes here? What would you say
particularly to non-Latino readers about why they should read this book?

How do you phrase this question for more "mainstream" writers? "Do you
think your whiteness and your white subject matter will limit your appeal?"
I'd love to hear the answers to that one! Call me crazy, but I happen to be
one of those writers who think that the Dominican experience is a universal
experience. What scares me is that the sci-fi and fantasy and fanboy content
of this novel, not its dominicanidad, may narrow its appeal. People
(I should put that word in quotes) visit (another quotable) the Dominican
Republic because they want to experience certain kinds of packaged
otherness, not because they want to hear some guy going on about the
Dionysian architects in From Hell. But that's how it is with all
art: You construct an imaginary audience in your work and then you hope that
its real-world analog will actually show up. Whether it occurs now or two
hundred years from now is another question. I just happen to believe that
folks of all cultures and colors, and grad school types and immigrants and
lexics (people who love to read) and fanboys and fangirls and love-story
addicts and lit heads and homeboys and homegirls and history buffs and
activists and family-epic lovers and nerds can all sit in the same room
together and blab usefully. In fact, I believe that all of the above were
meant to sit in the same room and blab usefully to one another. I'm
idealistic that way.

There are a lot of literary references in this story, from comic books
and science fiction to Henry Miller and Ayn Rand. But the dominant one is J.
R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. What role does it play here?

I'm not sure The Lord of the Rings is the only shadow text
lurking inside the book. One could argue that the movie Virus and
the anime/manga Akira are also important. But if I have to choose,
I'd say it's both The Lord of the Rings and the work of the comics
titan Jack Kirby that whisper constantly through these pages. Tolkien
certainly is a favorite of Oscar, the protagonist, and also of the narrator,
Yunior. Like a lot of young readers I grew up with Tolkien, back when the
only film was that Ralph Bakshi craziness. For better and worse, dude shaped
a lot of contemporary fantasy conventions and fantasy audiences, and for me
- for someone who grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, the Dominican
Republic's once and future dictatorship - it was hard to think about that
awful reign without comparing it a little to the Sauronic menace in
The Lord of the Rings. It's not that Trujillo was a Sauron; both
Sauron and his master Morgoth were asexual and global in ways that Trujillo
never was, but all three Dark Lords (Morgoth, Sauron, Trujillo) sought to
achieve total tyrannies, the Lidless Eye everywhere, and there's much in
their projects that resonates.

Kirby's work is equally vital to the book: his insane creativity, his
cosmic-level mythologies, and iconography, which flipped my lid when I was
growing up. I mean, consider his signature villain, Darkseid, whom I also
tie to Trujillo: Darkseid and his Omega Beams and their ability to
encapsulate a person - have you ever heard or seen anything like that? You
have if you grew up in Santo Domingo. And then there was Kamandi.
When Oscar dreams the end of the world, he dreams in Kamandi lines.
And I'm sure it's obvious to those who read the novel that I'm a huge fan of
Kirby's character The Watcher, who seemed to me the ultimate parigüayo, a
perfect symbol for both Oscar and my narrative persona.

I'm sure you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I'm sorry! But
what matters is this: In my youth the only people who really seemed to be
interested in exploring dictatorlike figures were the fantasy and science
fiction writers, the comic-book artists. You didn't see much about that
aspect of the world in the mainstream culture, so as a kid who was the child
of a dictatorship I had to find analogs in the genres, and since that was
the language that explained to me the scope and consequences that kind of
power has on people (on myself), that was the language I deployed to explore
those very questions in my own book.

Which writers have influenced you the most? Which ones do you read for
pleasure?

The weight of Dominican history hangs heavily over this book,
especially the dictatorship of Trujillo. Is this something that
Dominican-Americans are still very much aware of?

History weighs heavy everywhere. It's just that very few people care to
feel it. And no, I don't think the average Domo in the Diaspora knows much
about the Trujillato or its legacies. And I don't think any book is going to
change that. But maybe one person will be inspired to poke around, and
that's not bad numbers when you think about it.

What's your own personal relationship to the Dominican Republic? Do
you still have close family members there? Do you visit often?

What can I tell you? My home country is really screwed up, politically,
economically, socially, but I love the place. It feeds my humanity. I go
about three times a year. Still have family and friends, a life of sorts,
allá. If you see me on the plane or waiting for my luggage, say hi, you
know.

You're a tenured professor of creative writing at MIT now. Do you find
a conflict between your teaching and your writing, or do they feed each
other?

I love my students to death, but it's a lot easier to write when you're
not teaching. These are smart kids, so you put a lot into it, and that
always takes its toll. But teaching is an attempt to give back, you know, so
it's hard for me to think of being a writer without teaching.

Have you decided what your next book will be yet? What are you working
on now?

I'm trying to write my "Psychic Terrorist Kills New York City" novel.
Guess I'm stubborn as hell. Or just stupid.

The above interview was conducted around 2007

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher.
This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.

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